Even Flash Can Get Viruses

Posted by timothy on Tuesday January 8, 2002 @10:44AM from the blesshyoo dept.

Mechel Conrad writes: "Heise Online(German) writes about a Virus called SWF/LFM-926. It consists of a Macromedia Flash movie and seems to be the first of its kind. It uses Flash's scripting language in order to open a debug terminal creating and executing a file called V.COM, which infests other .SWF Files. Although the virus is not very dangerous and not widespread yet, it suggests clear security holes in Flash." The translation of the Heise article is quite readable, too. Update: 01/08 22:47 GMT by T : bdavenport adds: "this report on Yahoo lists a new Shockwave virus as low grade due to the need of manual downloading. infoworld is reporting that McAfee has upgraded to high risk after several Fortune 500 firms have reported it in the wild, arriving as an email attachment."

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Re:Java applet viruses? by C.+Mattix · 2002-01-08 11:15 · Score: 4, Interesting

For Java to do anything bad it has to have explicit permission from the user. In that case, in my opinion, it isn't a virus, just a dangerous program and the user should acuatlly read the warning boxes.
It could happen if some company would give away the private keys for a trusted company and then use that key to sign a modified and dangerous version. (Say like a rooted version of Yahoo chat or something like that, that has to be trusted to run right.)